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The Seybold Report • Volume 12, Number 3 • February 13, 2012 ↵ Home 7

Project Love

A PODI Digital Print Case Study


Boden, a mail order clothing retailer based in the United Kingdom, also operates in the United States and Europe selling quality clothes for the whole family and believes in making its customers feel and look great. The company uses catalogs primarily to sell its clothing lines. The challenge the company faces with 52 million pieces of direct mail each year is constantly develop fresh ideas for creating an immediate emotional connection with the customer while demonstrating the company’s core values and growing sales.

For the Winter 2010 catalog Boden created a highly personalized catalog in keeping with the commission of their Founder and Chairman, Johnnie Boden, to “bring back the love” to their customer communications. The company also wanted to integrate the campaign across every customer touchpoint, from e-mail and social media to the experience customers receive when they contact the call center.

Campaign Objectives:

  • The campaign objectives were to:
  • Achieve a minimum of 2% uplift in response rates,
  • Increase Return-on-Investment, and
  • Lead customers to a competition on Boden’s Web site.

Results

The results yielded by the 250,000 personalized catalogs and 200,000 personalized e-mails were significantly better than those achieved by the generic catalog cover sent to other recipients.

The results included:
  • A 30% uplift in response rates,
  • A 12% higher click-through rate (personalized e-mails),
  • A ROI of the whole campaign higher than the generic catalog,
  • 3,000 competition entries, 250 posts to Boden’s Facebook page, and more than 1,000 related comments, and
  • Hundreds of customers submitted positive, unprompted feedback via the company call center.

Campaign Architecture

Boden selected a cross-section of 250,000 of its best, singular, and lapsed buyers for the campaign. The rest of the Winter 2010 catalog recipients received a generic, unpersonalized version based on the same theme.


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